


To Remember

by i_just_knew1013



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-19
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-10-31 09:25:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17846774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/i_just_knew1013/pseuds/i_just_knew1013
Summary: As she clipped a sample of hair for the DNA test, she also quietly slipped a tiny piece  of his raven locks into the pocket of her jacket. Just in case, she told herself.





	To Remember

As she clipped a sample of hair for the DNA test, she also quietly slipped a tiny piece of his raven locks into the pocket of her jacket. Just in case, she told herself. To remember, she quietly pleaded. 

Scully had been collecting keepsakes as long as she could remember. Moving around with the navy, she wasn’t allowed to keep much. But scully liked to find something small from each place she had been over the years. The items were usually things that reminded her of the places where she left pieces of her self behind. Leave a piece, take a piece, keep balance in the world. When she was five, it was an acorn from the tree where she used to sit and play with her dolls. At seven, a rock from the beaches in Hawaii where she almost drowned in a riptide. When she was 11, Scully left a piece of her heart behind in North Dakota when her father was transferred to a new base. She took with her the only thing she could think of at the time, a bottle cap she found on the ground behind the library where she received her first kiss. 

Scully kept her mementos in a small box covered in sea shells. It was a memento itself; something she had made at a Kids in the Navy Family Picnic event when she was eight. Every so often she would get the box down from the back of the shelf in her bedroom closet, sit down in the middle of her floor, and carefully take the items out one by one. A coaster from the dive bar near the base when she was 14 where she had her first drink. A wrist band from the first concert she went to when she was 16. When she was working at Wings N Things, her first job in high school, she walked out in the middle of a shift after the boss grabbed her ass. She took with her her name tag, emblazoned with tiny stickers and a pin advertising their (World Famous!) wing sauce. 

But when Scully started working on the x files, her collection began to change. She started keeping things that reminded her of the cases she’d been on, or how her life had changed because of them. After Oregon the first time, she added a matchbook from the hotel where she learned about her partner’s past and his passion to find answers to some of the biggest questions in his life. Two pennies that inexplicably were fused together. Some memories were happy, like the tiny jar of ballpark dirt from the the night she learned about hips and hands. Others, like the rose petal she took from the Wall just before her fateful trip to Philadelphia, held pain and unspoken words. Scully refused to skip over any items in her box when she would go through it. She felt every memory had equal worth. Every item was a roadmap to her heart. 

That night, after she sat beside the body of her nearly-grown child and sobbed out her broken apologies, she sat on the floor in her bedroom and opened her box. She lifted the soft hair from her pocket and wrapped it with a small ribbon to hold it together. Then, after holding it to her tear-stained face one last time she placed it in her box next to another ribbon-bound piece, this one smaller and more fair. The phone rang, and she knew instinctively who it was. She answered the phone. “Scully. Ok...I’m on my way.” She let her fingers graze the locks gently, then closed the box, effectively tucking her feelings back inside for another day. She slipped her shoes back on, grabbed her gun and headed out the door.


End file.
